Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @07:00PM
from the what's-the-word dept.

jjslash writes "Microsoft's PR machine has been hard at work over the past few months, trying to explain the numerous improvements Windows 8 has received on the backend. But are there real tangible performance differences compared to Windows 7? TechSpot has grabbed the RTM version of Windows 8, measuring and testing the performance of various aspects of the operating system including: boot up and shutdown times, file copying, encoding, browsing, gaming and some synthetic benchmarks." Lots of other sites are running reviews including: Infoworld, CNET, Computerworld, and Gizmodo, with very mixed opinions.

It looks like a step back to Windows 3.1 (which I hated). Instead of the convenience of having all your programs in a nice listing (the start menu), they are hidden in a bewildering mess of program groups & overlapping windows.

Curses.Back then I avoided the mess that was 3.1 by sticking with my Commodore Amiga until Win98 arrived, but now that option no longer exists.

Everybody keeps complaining about the interface. Really it's like it just opens the start menu on bootup. From there you can hang around the desktop all you want. I didn't like it at first but then once I realized that you could hit the start button and stat typing what you wanted, similar to the current start menu, who cares? PLEASE keep bitching about the same thing thinking it'll change. Thanks for your valuable input.

There is no "start button" to "hit" from what I saw. Instead there is a Windows key on your keyboard and you can hit that and release, if you know to try that. If you try to use just the mouse you will get nowhere for a long time. If you just start typing you won't get anywhere either. If you accidentally clicked one of those big square buttons and now you want to get back to where you were you will be in for a lot of frustration.

Everyone who says it's obvious only says that because they have learned th

1. Defending something repeatedly without a solid argument doesn't make a good case for it either. Take your own advice.

2. Starting a program should not be a full screen modal interruption on a modern machine. this is fine for tablets....or ms-dos, but not workstations. This trend of forcing users to get used to 'full screen only' again is part of that current dumb-it-down 'undevelopment' race to the bottom. It must stop.

3. The whole point of a gui is avoid having to type repetitive, simple commands. If their design actually takes longer than typing it out, like the playskool menu does, they've failed. The search box is an admission of failure. Just give me a console a-la quake; hit tilde and down comes a prompt ready to go...or leave the start menu alone. It works fine. The windows 7 start menu search is also stupid for the same reasons.

I'm confused about #3. The Win8 Start screen displays way more apps than the Win7 Start menu. If anything, the Win8 screen greatly increases the chances of the app you want being right there and not requiring a click of All Programs so I don't see how it is any less efficient. From what I have seen, the only advantage the Start menu has over the Start screen is easier location of recently installed applications.

Though I have to also say that in Win7 (and XP and Vista) I start programs either from a taskbar

Calm down, scared old man. You can still use your mouse, but if you can type, and are not scared by this paradigm, you can find anything you want by pressing the Windows key, then typing, then pressing enter. It's so much faster than any menu, including the Start menu.

But I'm sure you're correct and all the intelligent people who made it are incorrect.

Which is not an obvious thing to do. The only thing really obvious is how to slide the prebuilt list of applications back and forth. Everything else is somewhat mysterious until you figure it out. Including how to leave an application if you accidentally activate it while sliding the icons back and forth.

This thing needs to come with a default help/tutor application, similar to what came with some earlier versions of Windows.

It plays marble madness! Has the memory expansion that hangs off the side and two floppys. It's a pre-release. Shipped to SW companies early. Most of the docs too. Haven't booted it in a decade. Call it a barn find.

Hey, give them a break. They figured out and fixed just barely in time the fact that purple everywhere + the name metro = metrosexual connotation lol. I wonder what they're going to do when people realize tablets are netbooks without keyboards. It's the netbook crash all over again! I refuse to touch my PC monitor so, they seem screwed lol.

Because the next set of PC's will have more tablet features in them. For Most People. You buy a computer and you keep your OS version for the life of the computer. If it came with Windows 7, the PC was designed to run Windows 7... You stay on Windows 7 until you want a new computer.

Now after Windows 8 comes out, you will fine more and more PC's with multi-touch screens. (I myself have a Lenovo 220t, with Windows 8 RTM on it, and the interface is really nice and I like it better then Windows 7), because windows 8 supports it it means more PC manufactures will use it. Thus Microsoft tying to make multi-touch better.

This Windows 8 Touch Screen seems like the same debate 20 years ago, when PC's started to ship with a Mouse as a common device. It started out as a toy, with only a few applications that used it. While Apple had the mouse common, the PC was mostly still Keyboard, CPU, Monitor. Then when Windows 3.1, Most PC's started to come with a mouse standard, as well the applications for Windows started to use the mouse more. There were a ton of people who hated it, and we still get the debate today. However it is a case of Software that Drives the hardware. So when you next Laptop/Tablet/PC it will probably be reconfigured to be used as a touch device.

Yeah, anyone who disagrees with you is a sycophant or astroturfer. You speak the unimpeachable Truth and all others are Damned. Please spare me this BS. I don't disagree with you, necessarily, but I hate the demonization of those who disagree with you. Dissent is healthy.

The biggest trouble I found was lack of documentation. Trying to figure out how to use Metro on your own is not trivial. While one article touted that you really didn't need start menu after all and that you could do the same thing with Metro, it took me a half hour to find a slow way to get up a menu, and another half hour to find a fast way to do this! If you're used to Windows or any other mouse based desktop system you may think that you can use the right mouse button, or maybe bring the mouse to the various sides of the screen, or click left or right on any blank spot on the screen (very few places not covered with "click here to buy stuff" icons).

I was baffled until I found a tiny spot to move the mouse where something happened (all the way to bottom right, size of a hanging chad). Eventually I found the _real_ way this is intended to be used. The Windows Key. You know, that key that most real computer users laughed at when they first found it and have not used it since. Just push it by itself and release and something happens. Sure some Windows experts may have memorized things like Windows+S for start menu or things like that, but most people I know never use it, or consider using it by itself and not as a modifier key. It's an extremely inconvenient key for touch typists as the placement is awkward. I always though it was a bit underused in most Windows versions, compared to the Command key in MacOS. But once you know to push this key all sorts of things can get done with metro, including popping up an amazingly ugly menu full of tiny black boxes. If you want to use Metro effectively you will need to learn a set of keyboard shortcuts!

That's the weird thing. How is anyone going to know based on their past experience to push this key as the primary means of UI interaction? On my android phone that came with zero documentation at least I saw three buttons at the bottom I could tap with my finger and eventually things would happen. Even the Nokia Lumia with the same basic look as Windows 8 comes with some buttons to push. But a windows user would naturally assume they need to click stuff with a mouse, and there's nothing to click except the default applications (not even real applications, they're more like smart URLs such as a "travel" icon with photo of eiffel tower, most of which no professional will ever use).

In the past people with visions were sometimes called mystics, sometimes called possessed, and sometimes locked up for their own safety. Today though people with visions are put in charge of product design.

In all fairness, some of OSX 10.8's defaults irked me to no end... Just migrated from 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and have to say, the first 3 apps I wanted to install are not "From known developers on the Mac Store"... then there were a number of apps I use (newest versions *only* on the Mac Store). As a developer, I expect a number of applications to not work well within the new sandbox rules, and to make the default to only allow Mac Store installs is infuriating.

Some of the features may seem like they are just catching up but in most of the important ways Windows is just plain better. Sorry but that's a fact. Linux is free while Win7 costs over $100. If something that is free still can't compete *at all* then there is very little room to say it's better or even nearly as good.Maybe you like it better. A few people do. That's fine but you are not typical.

So here is the deal, I get a worse user interface, get to pay more for an operating system that offers virtually no benefit. Man I am so glad I shifting to OSX and Linux around the time Windows 8 was announced and released to devs. This is going to bite them in the ass and IMO with what I am experiencing with OSX and Linux, Microsoft really does suck!

Don't fucking use it then as you obviously have done. Why the hell are you complaining about an OS you're not going to use?

I'm still running Vista, which was slated by just about everyone. It's stable, runs what I want, and I really can't complain about it. Dropping a few services makes performance comparable to 7, and I've got a decent system anyway that doesn't suffer from slowdown because of Vista being a hog. I've had about 6 months uptime on this system, which I use for gaming, work, surfing, etc.

If you don't want to use the software, why are you moaning about it? I'm not going to use it, either - there's no reason for me to upgrade at the moment.

The new version of windows always sucks for games until nvidia and ati get around to tweaking things. Give it 6-8 months for everything to catch up. If you plan on installing Win8 on day one and expecting everything to work as good as, or better than the 36 month old Win7 ecosystem, you're insane.

The driver's job is to talk to the hardware.The API's job is it talk to the driver.

Windows 8 uses Direct X 11 as the API, same as Windows 7.The driver is the same the hardware is the same, there's been no major change in the driver systems in Windows 8 which has been documented (unlike the move to Vista).

Given this why am I not right to expect Windows 8 to perform identically to Windows 7 from day one?

- But are there real tangible performance differences compared to Windows 7?- TechSpot has grabbed the RTM version of Windows 8, measuring and testing the performance of various aspects of the operating system

Expected a "... and" followed by the TechSpot answer!
What the point of TFS if one has to read up to TFA?/. writes interesting summaries based on interesting stories.

I don't see how it indicates "bias". It does indicate an inability to produce a relatvely meaningful benchmark (as in one that allows comparison).

Similarly the "Windows logo to desktop" seems like a strange benchmark as the benchmark result would be improved by simply showing the Windows logo later. Why wouldn't you just compare the time from power on to desktop (which is presumably what people actually care about)?

Except, when comparing two identical machines like they should have done, there should be zero differences except for the OS. So, from the first push of the button to the desktop is a good metric.

But, what I think is an even better metric, is from push of the button to USABLE desktop. I noticed that Win7 seemed faster to boot than XP on an equal machine, but I think Win7 may just in fact be faster to get you to a desktop, and it keeps loading things in

I just played with it for a while and it feels way much more snappier and responsive. The application start perceivably faster. That is the thing that nobody benchmarks, but it could be benchmarked with a clever approach.

That's why everybody says MacOS is so fast - because it *feels* snappier not because 10GB files copies faster. That's what the developers should strive for, not a win in some synthetic "how long does it take to do X" benchmarks.

Where is the first post from a uid above 2600Hz uh, I mean 2600000 praising windows 8 ?

Did we get rid of them ? Slashdot will live for ever, forget about the 6 digits or lower uid posts that say/. has come so low they will never come back. They are lying./. is too addictive and funny also.

Steep learning curve (nothing to 'learn' obviously -- it's just a new interface -- but it's very different from Windows 7 and definitely takes some getting used to)

Tangibly faster startup / shutdown / resume etc.

Tangibly faster switching between apps / windows etc.

Unfinished in terms of adopting to the new UI paradigms. Several places where you end up back in the old way of doing things, or going back to the control panel to look for settings. It's clearly still there as a catch-all.

Some awkwardness in terms of managing processes. Clearly, it's designed for you to not think about that stuff. But windows users of old aren't used to that and want to know how to exit an app. You can kill apps quite easily, but it's part of the so-called learning curve.

Windows ME was awful. Windows 2000 was pretty much the first version of the platform I would call usable. Cairo was very buggy, then a little more buggy, then a little less buggy a degree at a time through SP3. Vista was the ME of NT (ie, bloody awful). 7 is a fairly decent platform. By that I mean, I haven't had a kernel crash in over a year of using it on a daily basis, and that is saying something - every single other OS I have ever used has had a kernel

That's reasonable. There's no reason everyone has to use the same OS, and no reason a user has to buy into every new version.

Lots of people skipped Vista.

I don't mind when companies swing and miss. I like to have lots of choices, and I don't think three is nearly enough for desktop operating systems, especially nowadays since desktop apps are a little less important.

Between my wife, my daughter and me, and all our different projects and careers, there are at leas

Vista was the ME of NT (ie, bloody awful). 7 is a fairly decent platform. By that I mean, I haven't had a kernel crash in over a year of using it on a daily basis, and that is saying something.

Did you ever use Vista? It got horrendously bad press because it was dog slow on crap machines. It should never have been installed on them.

I'm still using it, and have had over 6 months uptime. 7 might be better, but Vista was only catastrophic because it was run on low end hardware and had every possible service enabled as default. That's Microsoft's fault, completely, but Vista isn't the turd you make it out to be.

I did eight years of support, Vista was without doubt the worst of the bunch - and yes, I had to learn it so I knew the shit of which I spoke. I would say it was even worse than ME; at least you could fall back to 98 drivers for ME if push came to shove, you couldn't use 2k-specific drivers on Vista. If it didn't come with Vista drivers, you were screwed. xp drivers were more miss than hit on Vista, by a very wide margin. As to performance, I insisted on dog's bollocks machines for my support gear, and Vist

I don't consider myself a luddite. I usually have an open mind about change. I don't mind if the start menu changes. Heck, I don't need a start menu. I don't feel like there's something missing in Mac OS X when I use the Dock, Spotlight and Finder together to get where I need to be.

*But* the 'Metro' launcher is an abomination. Having something fill my entire screen with glaring colours and toybox tiles when I am looking to launch an application is the exact opposite of the discreet, unintrusive interface that I'm looking for on a workstation desktop.

What did users complain about with Vista? UAC. They hated that every five minutes all your colours went grey, and you couldn't continue without clicking yes on a box in the middle of the screen. But UAC did that because, love it or hate it, there was a reason for it to demand your attention and draw you out of whatever you were doing.

The 'Metro' launcher has no such reason. It completely breaks my flow of thought every time it swallows my desktop. It breaks the illusion that I am working on a constant surface. It is a jarring alteration to the consistency of the desktop experience. It causes the eye and the mind to pause, to catch, and to wonder what the fuck is going on. It might as well be a BSOD for the effect it has on my concentration.

Now with time, I accept that the 'where did all my stuff go?' feeling will dissipate. The interruption will become familiar and not shocking. We'll get used to it. But I fundamentally refuse to accept that a glaring fullscreen, interuption is a step forward in UI. Stick it on a tablet by all means. But it is simply not suited to genuine cognitive multitasking.

If you use OSX consider what OSX was like with regard to the Classic box. You are, using your metaphor, upset that your workflow with classic works worse on OSX than it did on OS9. Well yeah, of course.

And I would suspect for GDI applications Windows 9 is going to be even more uncomfortable. Where it will shine is Metro applications. And that's the point to start shifting the development community over to the new interface. Apple hit tremendous resistance as they moved people from Classic to Carbon to C

What did users complain about with Vista? UAC. They hated that every five minutes all your colours went grey, and you couldn't continue without clicking yes on a box in the middle of the screen.

That never happened. It happened when installing drivers, programs, everything, because it should happen. Perhaps people got a bad impression early on because that's when they were installing the programs.

UAC is fine. It only throws up when you're trying to something you should need administration privileges to

Something feels wrong about comparing Windows 7/w Office 2010 and Windows 8/w Office 2013. Will Office 2013 not be available for Windows 7 or something? Why would you compare two different Office products in two different operating systems? Seems like an unreliable metric if you're trying to compare the performance between operating systems and not different versions of Office.

I also noticed that the JS benchmarks were completely incomparable. Each benchmark was for a different browser, and the browser company that made each test suite won (firefox won the kraken suite, and google won the V8 suite).

I would have been interested to see Chrome on Win7 VS Chrome on Win8, or FF on Win7 VS FF on Win8, but alas.

I hate the new metro interface, but i like some features like: easy restore (refresh and reset), windows to go, virtualization, shorter boot times and newer windows display driver model. Let's see how it does

Is it worth upgrading from Win7 for a standard desktop or standard laptop? For most users, probably not. Windows 8 is designed for hybrid tablets, Kinect-style PC-interfacing, unusual monitor configurations, etc. It's for "non-standard" computing, generally. If benchmarking were updated to capture "usability" in many different computing environments, this is where Win8 would leap ahead of its predecessor.

Is it worth upgrading from Win7 for a standard desktop or standard laptop? For most users, probably not. Windows 8 is designed for hybrid tablets, Kinect-style PC-interfacing, unusual monitor configurations, etc. It's for "non-standard" computing, generally. If benchmarking were updated to capture "usability" in many different computing environments, this is where Win8 would awkwardly hobble before falling over and obstructing the path while shouting and pissing itself ahead of its predecessor.

The OS is supposed to manage the available resources. It's easy when you just run one thing at a time.. I want to know how Windows 8 performs when you have 3 number crunching jobs, each requiring 2 GB running at low priority, a different process which loads 6 GB of data into RAM, a steady stream of IO from each process, interactive use, and maybe some music or video too. Throw in a VM too, to really push it. Does it still manage to be responsive and interactive?

My Win 7 laptop with 4 GB RAM becomes unpleasant to use when I start a VM which uses 2 GB. My Linux box has 16 GB and it handled the above scenario pretty well, but adding another instance of the 6 GB fitting job caused it to crash! (I was swapping to something that wasn't meant to be used as swap, so my fault). Admittedly, testing OSes under stress isn't easy to do reproducibly, but I think a subjective opinion would be really interesting....

Why does everyone assume Metro Apps are mandatory? Metro is only mandatory for the ARM version. The 64bit version I use on my laptop can run Desktop Mode, and it works great, much improved over Windows 7. Other than a Metro looking lock screen and wireless network connect screen, you could hardly tell the difference by looking.

Two steps, 1) Click the desktop app, 2) Install Vistart, a 3rd party start menu replacement. I am not trolling, I am being serious. I can stay in desktop mode for weeks. After you wake up your computer from hibernation, type in your password, it returns you right to where you left off, in desktop mode. Default file associations might go to metro apps, but you can change those too. OK Vistart won't let me right click on anything in the start menu, but that isn't a huge deal. I don't know why that guy called me a troll. I've been using windows 8 on my home laptop for months. I am in desktop mode 99% of the time. As far as the ugly theme in desktop mode goes, no big deal. Someone will come out with a nice themeing program or hack for it at some point. I've been saying this for months. I've been using windows 8 since before they even had Metro in the leaked builds. I've had lots of time to notice the nice features.

Seriously, use windows 8 with Vistart. It's a free program. You may miss a few advanced features of the Windows 7 start menu, but you will like all the positive changes of Windows 8 more than the negative ones. Here is just one example. Windows 8 does not interrupt your presentation to remind you to reboot your computer to install an update. It gives you days worth of warning before it nags like that. Another example, if you are copying a bunch of files and one can't copy, you can just hit skip, and it will continue with everything else. You can also pause fie copying. Plus, Windows 8 doesn't have that nasty explorer refreshing bug that Windows 7 has. I haven't tested this, but I bet it doesn't have the nasty failed backups if you use a custom library bug that Windows 7 has. What is Windows 7 biggest missing feature? Native ISO mounting? Windows 8 has that. I've reinstalled Windows 8 several times over the past year, 2 or three leaked builds, then three official betas, then the RTM. I never had to install Daemon Tools or Security Essentials as part of that process, because those features are baked right in.

Plus, Internet Explorer 10 is nice. It is standards compliant. I am developing a website and targeting Chrome/Safari as the recommended browsers, but I would like it to work in IE10. It mostly works in IE9, but that required a lot of work, some features will never work in IE9. My modern HTML5/CSS3 website using canvas and FileReader API works just as well in IE10 as Chrome.

If you only mess around with Metro for a couple hours, how do you expect to notice all the changes under the hood? I have been using Windows 8 for months. Actually, I have been using Windows 8 for over a year now. I am still discovering nice new features. I've been using since you had to hack Metro into it, because it came disabled in all beta builds before developer preview.

Come on moderators, give me a few points so people can read this. Windows 8 in desktop mode with Vistart is a very nice experience. You can't review an OS in a weekend, I've been using it for a year and a half or so.

1. If a product comes out of the gate needing a hack to bring in critical but missing functionality, there's something seriously wrong. Vistart is a nice tactical fix, but it doesn't change the fact that the only reason microsoft removed the start menu was to force people to interact with metro. This was done for marketing reasons. It's in users' best interests not to support this behavior with their money.

2. presentation interruption/file copy bugs/iso mounting etc. all of these are simple additions that

Well, most users rarely have more than one or two apps running at the same time anyway. Also those who use more generally have all of them maximized so that for all practical purposes they might as well only have one of them open. Considering how few people ever even try to multitask, what difference does it make if Windows 8 isn't good at it. (Assuming, of course, that it isn't. I only use Linux, so I've no idea how good Windows 8 is or isn't.)

Have you actually tried to use Metro? It's very responsive and looks gorgeous, at least from the demo apps Microsoft has created. IE in Metro mode is an improvement over IE in Desktop mode. And, if you don't like it, Desktop mode is a click away, and you are safe back in Win7 style UI environment.

I shouldn't feed trolls but I'll bite. I've used Metro. It *is* a steaming pile of crap. This is coming from someone who is relatively OS agnostic. I use Win 7 and love it. I use various flavors of *nix and love them for various reasons as well. I have on OS X box, it's pretty cool. I'm not too fond of my iPad (it's mostly a lab device anways for me) but I love my Asus Transformer Prime. I use many OSes.

Windows 8 is OK on a tablet device. On a desktop it is a steaming pile of turd. There is absolut

How was I trolling, exactly? I'm not the one using the word "abortion" or the phrase "steaming pile of crap". I agree with you that this is not a compelling upgrade for the keyboard/mouse crowd, but then again, Metro wasn't really designed for that, was it?

You're right, nothing you said was an obvious troll. I just find Metro to be such a horrible interface that I tend to knee jerk when someone praises such an obviously bad upgrade option. There is not one compelling reason for any PC user to upgrade to Windows 8, but given Microsoft's track record Windows 9 will be out in a couple of years and will address that. I'm looking forward to it. Windows 8 is a non-starter. It won't gain much traction in the tablet market even though Metro is well suited to it,

I used the words, you betcha I did. It IS crap. It interferes with the user getting his work done in a fast & efficient manner. A desktop is not a tablet. How many times do people need to hear that? Holy Christ, this thing is going to suck wet dead bears-- No business will go NEAR it. And one more thing, if Apple is driving this headlong rush towards smartphone/tablet interfaces being out on desktop (and I'm looking at you too, Ubuntu) then why isn't OSX that way? Metro I mean Modern is shit. You know i

I love how every review mentions how startup and/or shutdown times have improved slightly, as was the case when Windows 7 was released. However, they seem to miss two somewhat important aspects of this:

1. It is not very common for users to turn their PCs on and off several times during the day. Also, there's hibernate. I, for one, keep my PC on for weeks at a time unless I'm somehow forced to reboot, which brings me to...

2. While a regular startup has been getting a second or two faster with every release, the new Windows Update subsystem (introduced in Vista) means it takes BLOODY AGES TO SHUT DOWN THE DAMN OS if there happens to be updates pending, and if you're lucky IT WILL ALSO TAKE BLOODY AGES TO START THE DAMN THING UP AGAIN AFTERWARDS, as the update process is finished. And if you turn off the computer while this is happening, you will probably have to reinstall Windows.

I've hosed a few systems by shutting down a laptop after a meeting or presentation, only to find that Windows wanted to spend the next half an hour or so installing updates.

If you can even get the damn updates to install... I stopped using W7 when after several fresh installs it hung on a few critical vulnerability fixes. Fuck that, I already feel like I'm browsing around with a bullseye on my back, I'm not strapping dynamite on too -- Windows 8 sounds like adding blinders so I won't even know what hit me...

I never understood why. On Debian unstable, I can go a couple months and then apt-get upgrade half a gig of packages in less time than my girlfriend's Windows 7 machine can run some routine updates. Downloading the files takes forever, which I suppose could be caused by a lack of server capacity on Microsoft's part, but why does it take so long to check for new updates or install an update?

It's been that way ever since they first implemented it. I thought it would

Windows Update has become a non-issue for most users since it mostly does it's thing in the background and during idle time these days. Clearly MS just left the broken old implementation in place because there were more impactful things to fix.

These days, yes, although I disabled automatic updates on my girlfriend's computer because it wanted to reboot the machine at night after certain updates, and her motherboard is flaky and doesn't reboot right sometimes.

That doesn't explain why it was slow for more than a decade.

I'm not complaining (anymore), since I no longer work with Windows machines except for a few family computers. I'm just curious as to what it's doing that makes it so slow.